by Fiona Quinn
Instead, I had decided to do two things. One: gather intelligence on this guy so I could make my plans. Two: make sure he wasn’t driving drunk and destroying another family. I was being proactive, and that always felt better to me than treading water in a cesspool, waiting. But Hanasal had better freaking stop that whistling. In the moment, I only had but so much control over my emotions. And he was pushing my finger a little closer to the trigger with Every. Single. Note.
The woman was back, knocking on my driver’s side window. She must have circled the block.
I tapped the button and lowered the glass a few inches.
“Are you lost?” she asked. She didn’t actually sound like she wanted to be helpful, just wanted me to move along.
“Do you live here?” I pointed at the house.
The woman scowled.
“I thought Mr. Hanasal lived in this house, but then I saw you come out, and you’re not his wife.” If she knew that name, then she’d think I was there legitimately and not call the cops on me.
“Oh, dear.” Her face slipped into a frown. “Are you his friend?”
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen Mr. Hanasal.” Friend? Even to get me out of this situation, no, I would never call him a friend.
“Yes, sweetie. Mr. Hanasal died in a car accident. We bought the house from his estate. That was seven years ago.”
“That long…” My eye caught on the dash clock. “Okay,” I said, starting my engine again. “Thanks.”
“Are you all right? You look so sad.”
“Well…” Sad? No. Overwhelmed by having to relive all this? Absolutely. “It’s okay. Thanks. Thanks for checking in with me.” I added with a finger wave, so I seemed legit. Of course, I knew Hanasal was dead. I’d watched it happen.
She stepped back, and I drove off to collect Destiny.
Was it a coincidence that she chose that name when her case brought me to this particular part of the city? Or was this a message from the universe?
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was walking distance, Destiny had said.
Well, it was walking distance if you liked a good hike. Two miles wasn’t bad if you were fresh from a good night’s sleep. But two miles coming home from eight hours on your feet would be miserable.
Especially in this heat.
Destiny was sitting shotgun in my POS car, looking wrung out. “It’s there.” She pointed.
I had picked her up from her shift. Mine wasn’t for another hour—just enough time to move my backpacks and jar of peanut butter into her place.
Finley and Prescott were pleased by my arrangements. The fact that I’d gotten the job and was now moving in should keep the mission heading right along. We were speeding ahead with the case, and I was told that was imperative. And more importantly to this moment, Finley had told me that they didn’t think anyone was actively looking for this woman, though, yes, if she was found, she’d be in danger.
Destiny knew what was on the line. That’s why I was here. They hoped it wouldn’t take more than a couple of days to figure out her Achille’s heel so they could wrap her into their program.
“Why are you driving past?” she asked as I turned the corner and parked off the side of the road.
“Uhm…” I chewed on my lip, trying to come up with the right feel for this information. It needed to align me with her situation but at the same time not make her feel fearful of having me with her. “So this car comes from the place I ran away from. It was mine to drive while I was there, maybe not quite so fine for me to have driven off in.”
“Stolen?”
“Borrowed,” I said. “Ohio plates. No one in D.C. is going to care. But, all the same, if my plates came up on some cops computer system, I’d like to make it hard for them to track me down.” Now I needed to switch things up. “What about you?”
“Me?”
“Barb is on the run from her ex. You said Jim hires women who are in danger. Who’s after you?”
Her lips sealed tight. Her teeth locked.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. Just scale of one to ten, how dangerous is it for me to bunk with you?”
She looked at her lap for a long moment. “I don’t know,” she whispered.
Wow. Not what I expected. I’d have to run that by Prescott and Finley. If this was an imminently dangerous assignment, things needed to be reworked. I was not an operator.
Minimally, Iniquus would have me covered with Strike Force back up. They’d be running all kinds of systems and diagnostics. I wouldn’t be dangling in danger’s way without support.
“We’ll just need to stay low profile,” I said. “Get some money in the bank. Head down to Costa Rica and start a charmed life filled with coconuts and fresh fish.” I pulled the keys from the ignition and opened my door.
“How was the beach yesterday?”
I closed my eyes with a smile and inhaled like I could still smell the salty air. “Perfection.” I tugged my backpacks and sleeping bags from the backseat. “I haven’t got much. Would you mind lending a hand?”
We walked back up the street. I waited in the drive while Destiny went and rang the guy’s doorbell. “Hey there, checking in.”
“All’s good, chicky. You got a friend?” The homeowner’s wife-beater dangled from bony shoulders. His pants were belted under a rounded belly. He was barefooted and could use a shave, a shampoo, and a haircut.
“Yeah, she’s gonna hang around a bit.” Destiny turned. “I’ll check in tomorrow.” She skipped down the three brick steps and walked around the back of the house.
A two-story garage was tucked under the trees. The stairs on the right looked untrustworthy. I climbed behind her. “I have a key for you. I’ll give it to you upstairs,” Destiny said over her shoulder.
“Thanks.”
She unlocked the door handle and the deadbolt above, pushing the door wide.
Well…it was safer than sleeping in my car, I guessed.
It was clean.
The linoleum floor looked like it was laid in the seventies. That and the wood-paneled accent wall. The other walls were dingy neutral. Two massive, upholstered chairs looked like they’d either been left by the previous resident, or Destiny had dragged them from the curb before the garbage could pick them up.
I looked in the bedroom. She slept on a single mattress on the floor. Her clothes were folded in neat piles and lined up along the wall.
I moved to the bathroom with its avocado-colored ceramic toilet, bath and sink, and turquoise walls.
The galley kitchen was part of the great room.
“Get yourself settled in. I’m going to take a cold shower. No air conditioning.” She leaned over and turned on the box fan. “It’s not terrible. The trees keep the sun off. On really hot days, I go to the library and hang out. It’s two blocks past where you parked your car.”
Destiny went into the bathroom with a change of clothes tucked under her arm and shut the door.
I took the opportunity to do a security assessment. I’d need to report the situation to both Strike Force and the FBI.
Pulling my phone from my back pocket, I videoed the setup's locks, doors, and windows.
Fire trap. It looked like the only exfil was the door we came in.
Destiny didn’t have a fire extinguisher in the kitchen.
Peeking in her cupboards and fridge, I discovered there was little in the way of food. It looked like Destiny ate sandwiches.
She didn’t even own a pot.
I stalled at the kitchen window, looking between the trees. In my mind, I was trying to position myself geographically.
When I angled myself correctly, I could see the bar where Hanasal had been drinking the night he killed my dad.
Sometimes I loved how the universe worked, putting me in the right place for the right thing. I wasn’t thrilled about this. My parents were sending me a buzz. Pay attention!
Why was I here? What was I supposed to be remembering?
At seventeen, I thought I was bulletproof.
Since then, I have learned just how vulnerable a person can become.
Spyder knew what I was up to, and he allowed it. He let me act as if this was my op. Though I later learned that while I was working to bring justice for my dad, Spyder had his eyes on me the whole time, or someone did. He knew my every move. Always.
I never figured out how.
Spyder would never reveal his strategy.
When I found that out, though, I was annoyed that he hadn’t trusted me and the training he gave me to handle the situation myself.
Ah, the many things I would tell my teenaged self now that I knew better.
For example, I’ve learned the importance of having a team at your back, the buddy system. You don’t swim alone.
Back then, after I found out that Hanasal couldn’t be held responsible, I decided that a bad guy did bad guy things.
I had just needed to find something with enough oomph to force him home.
Prison would have been great, but off U.S. soil had been my second-best outcome:
Four days after my dad was buried, two days after I was given the news about Hanasal, I was justice bound.
It was Twenty-one thirty hours military time; I was in military mode. I had dressed in nondescript clothes and tucked my hair under a skullcap; the cap pulled low over my eyebrows. Most people started their identification process with the forehead and brow. So why feed people information? In my baggy clothes, I could be male; I could be female. I'd certainly blend into almost any background in these mousey colors that looked like pale winter dirt and cement.
So far, Hanasal seemed to have no clue that I was watching him.
I had to be careful; Spyder had taught me that I had to look at things around my target. The human brain feels the sensation of eyes on them, a limbic survival holdover from our earlier caveman times when those eyes might belong to a sabretooth tiger or some other predator. If a person felt the eyes, the target would scan to find the source, which would out you quicker than quick.
Once I had identified Hanasal, I shifted to focus on the things around him. I looked at his shoes, at his tires. I tried not to even think his name. I needed to guard my covert action.
Hanasal was driving a new car. Black. Shiny. He kept his diplomatic license plates.
Screw you.
He headed into the nearest low-rent neighborhood and pulled into a bar. The same bar where Hanasal was drinking the night of the crash.
Obviously, my dad’s death didn’t shake him loose from his drinking habit.
Pulling to the side of the lot, Hanasal parked face-in under a light, which told me he had no counter-surveillance training. And there he waited. My car didn’t fit in with the kinds of cars that parked in this lot. Mine was battered, rusty, and old. These cars were mainly middle class—except for Hanasal’s trophy of prestige and success.
I had parked on the street.
With my monocular, I watched Hanasal sitting there, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He was waiting for someone.
I had slid from my car. Lightly shutting the door, I crossed the street, moved up the block, and circled around to stand in the shadows of a broad, winter-naked elm.
A car drove up beside Hanasal’s, and Hanasal’s window powered down. The motor buzzed against the backdrop of bar music. The passenger window on the new car slid open.
Hanasal reached out to receive something, amber, and white. It looked like a prescription bottle from the pharmacy.
Are you a druggie, too, Hanasal? I shot video of the exchange. Or whatever it was. I held perfectly still as the other car drove away.
Then Hanasal went into the bar.
Checking my watch, I had waited for twenty minutes, making sure Hanasal had settled inside. Until I could get hold of his key fob, getting under the car’s hood or to the fuse box was going to be a problem. Crouching low, I moved toward the back tire and hammered a piece of metal that I had brought for just this reason through the tread. Air hissed as it escaped. I waited to make sure the tire was fully deflated, then did the same on the front. I laid a few more pieces on that side of the car— See? Someone left some building materials, and he pulled right in on top of them. Surely two flat tires would stop him. But just to make sure, I monkey crawled up onto the thick limbs of the tree and made myself as comfortable as I could.
My plan had been to call the police if Hanasal tried to make his way out of the parking lot on his two good tires.
“That which is yours will not slip you by.” Hanasal was mine. I would not let him slip away.
That’s not what Spyder meant.
But screw Spyder.
No, I don’t mean that. I quickly sent out the erasure thought in case Spyder caught hold of my words in the ether. I’m just really angry, Spyder. Lava-in-the-veins angry, and I’m about ready to erupt. I had to slow down my rage. Slow down my blood flow and my respiration as I perched on the limb.
I found it most helpful to pretend to be a lizard in the sun when I was tasked by Spyder to do stakeout practice. Stakeouts meant long, long, long periods of nothingness. But if the mind wandered, if I fell asleep, if I lost my focus, then I might lose my prey. I had found this twilight place somewhere between meditation and alertness. I tasked my brain with noticing my surroundings, searching out that delicious fly so that I could flick my tongue and savor the rewards of lying so still. It was a place where I didn’t feel my legs falling asleep from draping over the side of the branches or feel the cold wind bite at the tip of my nose.
It was a place of nothingness and expectation.
Eventually, the doors on the bar had banged open, and people trickled out and toward their cars. Hanasal wasn’t one of them. I checked my watch—something I tried not to do during stakeouts, lest I be discouraged that only one or two minutes had passed. I was rewarded with the surprise of last-call o’clock.
What do you do in a bar all alone for so long?
Ah, not alone.
I slowly pulled my phone from my pocket and videotaped Hanasal stumbling across the lot with his arm draped across a woman’s shoulder. He pulled out his car keys, pointed in the vague direction of the sedan, and pressed the fob. His car barked twice as his lights blinked, and he grinned a wide toothy grin. Startlingly white teeth. A Cheshire cat. The woman who was with him steered them to the car, and they climbed into the back seat.
What the heck? I was too high up to get a good angle on the backseat interior. I rounded to the back of the tree and shimmied my way back down. Lying on my stomach, I crawled on my elbows toward his car. It was the only vehicle left on this side of the lot. I slid my hand up alongside the door frame between the front and back windows and videotaped what was going on inside. When the woman spoke, I slowly lowered my arm and snaked my way back into the tree line.
The woman exited, made a phone call, walked to the street, and waited for the car that came five minutes later.
Hanasal stayed in the back of the car.
I opened the video. It was very dark in the interior, with the only illumination coming from the parking lot lights. From what I could make out, Hanasal pulled a wad of money from his breast pocket, peeled a couple of notes off, and handed them to the woman. The woman tucked the cash into her purse and then slid her dress bodice to the sides to expose her bare breasts. Hanasal licked at them greedily. He squeezed them and tweaked at her nipples. The woman grimaced and moved her hands over his to stop him from hurting her. She smiled and cocked her head to the side, then petted a hand down his chest and said something to him.
Hanasal slid his hips forward on the seat and spread his legs wide. Thank goodness the angle was bad, and I couldn’t make out the image. From her position, though, I’d imagine that she had unzipped his pants and dragged out his dick.
Huh. I wonder what the king and his daughter would think of you getting your wanger sucked off by some woman—and in public, no less?
Would this video be enough to get
him called back? Maybe it was traditional for men in that kingdom to have certain forms of relations outside of the marriage. I certainly couldn’t hand this evidence over to the police. His being a john couldn’t be prosecuted. His willy was free to get sucked in public, no problem. Shithead.
I had closed the video and waited. Nothing. I prowled toward his car.
Hanasal was stretched out in the back seat. With his mouth hanging open, his tongue draped loosely over his lip. He was passed out, his dick lying limply under his hand.
The alarm hadn’t chirruped when the woman exited; the alarm wasn’t engaged. I edged the door open. It was as cold inside the car as it was outside, but I still slid onto the seat and pulled the door almost all the way shut so the wind wouldn’t rouse him from his alcohol-induced, post-orgasmic coma.
His keys lay on the floorboard. I pocketed them. With the tips of my fingers, I stroked along the breast pockets of his jacket where I had seen him put his money. There was nothing there. I continued down to check the outside of his pants’ pockets, hunting for the prescription bottle. I didn't find it, either.
I had searched the car seats and along the floorboards, finally pulling the container out from under the driver’s seat. The lid was separate from the bottle. Whatever had filled the bottle was now gone.
After snapping a picture of the label, I exited the car and headed home.
I remembered thinking that I was supposed to train with Spyder in just a few hours. He’d have questions. I had no new answers.
“Hey, are you okay?” Destiny asked, coming out of the shower, her hair wrapped in a towel, frayed at the edges with faded pink stripes.